J. G. Ballard

Author:
Andrzej Gasiorek
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This book is a part of a series titled Contemporary British Novelists, which explores the influence of diverse traditions, histories and cultures on prose fiction. Science fiction provided one escape route from the social limitations and stultifying conventions of literary realism. It opened the door to preoccupations typically ignored by the mainstream writers from whom Ballard was alienated, and it enabled him to align himself with a 'popular' genre that mocked the overweening pretensions of so-called 'high' art. This book provides a darker reading of self-deification as the expression of the untrammelled monstrous ego, a reading that looks ahead to Ballard's exploration of nihilism in Millennium People. Ballard has suggested that 'our talent for the perverse, the violent, and the obscene, may be a good thing' and that we 'may have to go through this phase to reach something on the other side, it's a mistake to hold back and refuse to accept one's nature'. This commitment to the logic of the quest can then be read as a form of optimism, and enables Ballard to claim that his is 'a fiction of psychic fulfilment' because it encourages his characters to discover 'the truth about themselves' even if this process of discovery culminates in their deaths Ballard's late novels lay bare the psychopathologies of everyday life in a post-humanist world. His writing traces the sinister trajectories often taken by a potentially world-annihilating technology, it also explores the emancipatory hopes and the uneasy pleasures unleashed by the juggernaut of modernity.

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